The Mulago Foundation is a private foundation focused on

high impact philanthropy Effective altruism is a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, c ...

: investing in charities and philanthropic opportunities that have the highest impact. The foundation was originally envisioned by Rainer Arnhold, a

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

pediatrician and philanthropist, who taught at

Mulago Hospital Mulago National Specialised Hospital, also known as Mulago National Referral Hospital, is a component of Mulago Hospital Complex, the teaching facility of Makerere University College of Health Sciences. It is the largest public hospital in U ...

, Uganda. The foundation was officially created by his brother Henry Arnhold after Rainer Arnhold's death in 1993.

Operations

Criteria for funding organizations

The Foundation's stated goal is to identify and invest in the highest impact giving opportunities. On their "How we fund" page, they write that they are looking for three things: a ''priority problem'', a ''scalable solution'', and ''an organization that can deliver''. Once they identify an organization they wish to fund, they provide unrestricted and continued funding. Unlike most foundations, the Mulago Foundation does not accept or solicit proposals, but rather, the foundation itself tries to locate organizations to give to.

Organizations funded by Mulago

As of August 2012, the Mulago Foundation website listed about 30 organizations funded by the foundation. These included the

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fi ...

and Innovations for Poverty Action, which are two of the foremost organizations that use randomized controlled trials and other methods to evaluate the effectiveness of poverty alleviation programs and other programs aimed at helping poor people. Also on the list were

VillageReach VillageReach is a registered 501(c)(3) that works with governments to solve health care delivery challenges in low-resource communities. It is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, in the United States, with offices in various countries including ...

(which charity evaluator

GiveWell GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentag ...

listed as its top rated charity from 2009 to November 2011),

Living Goods Living Goods is a non-profit organization headquartered in Nairobi, with core operations in Uganda, Kenya, and Burkina Faso. Its mission is to saves lives at scale by supporting digitally empowered community health workers (CHWs) who deliver car ...

(which has been profiled in many media outlets), Bridge International Academies (a for-profit company focused on low-cost private education in the developing world)
Peepul India
(that works to improve learning in government education systems in India),

mothers2mothers mothers2mothers is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV by providing education and support for pregnant women and new mothers living with HIV. Founded in 2001, the organisation cu ...

, KOMAZA,

D-Rev Equalize Health (formerly D-Rev) is a not-for-profit medical technology company with offices in India, Kenya, and the United States. Equalize Health’s products include the ReMotion Knee, a polycentric prosthetic knee for above-the-knee amputees ...

Samasource Sama, formerly known as Samasource is a training-data company, focusing on annotating data for artificial intelligence algorithms. The company offers image, video and sensor data annotation and validation for machine learning algorithms in indust ...

, VisionSpring, Root Capital, Muso, and

The MicroDreams Foundation The MicroDreams Foundation is an American non-profit organization founded by Gregory Casagrande in 2002 as a microfinance accelerator that helps small, growing micro-enterprise development organizations reach financial self-sufficiency. Foundat ...

. Organizations listed as of December 2022 include Babban Gona,

Blue Ventures Blue Ventures is a science-led social enterprise that develops transformative approaches for nurturing and sustaining locally led marine conservation. The organisation works in partnership with coastal communities in places where the ocean is vit ...

Bridges to Prosperity Bridges to Prosperity is a United States-based nonprofit organization that partners with local governments to connect communities via pedestrian bridges. Bridges to Prosperity is based in Denver, Colorado, with staff around the world. Footbrid ...

Development Media International Development Media International (DMI) is a non-governmental organization with both non-profit and for-profit arms that "use scientific modelling combined with mass media campaigns in order to save the greatest number of lives in the most cost-eff ...

, Digital Green, Foundation for Ecological Security, Friendship Bench,

Global Forest Watch Global Forest Watch (GFW) is an open-source web application to monitor global forests in near real-time. GFW is an initiative of the World Resources Institute (WRI), with partners including Google, USAID, the University of Maryland (UMD), Esri, V ...

, Kheyti, Mountain Hazelnuts,

Nudge Institute The/Nudge Institute, formerly The/Nudge Foundation, is an Indian non-profit action institute established in 2015 with the aim to "build a poverty-free India."Anjuli Bhargava"Is it Possible to Make India Poverty-Free by 2047?" ''The Wire'', Apr ...

One Acre Fund One Acre Fund is a social enterprise that supplies smallholder farmers in East Africa with asset-based financing and agriculture training services to reduce hunger and poverty. Headquartered in Kakamega, Kenya, the organization works with farmer ...

SaveLIFE Foundation SaveLIFE Foundation (SLF) is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization focused on improving road safety and emergency medical care across India. SLF combines evidence-based research with policy advocacy, communication, and on-grou ...

, Ubongo Learning,

Urgewald Urgewald is a group that researches coal companies, because they are among the top contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and so cause climate change. The Global Coal Exit List, which they publish, is famous. Urgewald provided analysis to und ...

and Youth Impact.

Reception

Charity evaluator

described the Mulago Foundation as an "impact-focused" grantmaker (alongside the

Gates Foundation The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a merging of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was ...

Skoll Foundation The Skoll Foundation is a private foundation based in Palo Alto, California. The foundation makes grants and investments intended to reduce global poverty. Jeffrey Skoll created the foundation in 1999. The total assets of the foundation (includi ...

Children's Investment Fund Foundation The Children's Investment Fund Foundation (UK) (CIFF) is an independent philanthropic organisation with offices in Addis Ababa, Beijing, London, Nairobi and New Delhi. It is a registered charity in England and Wales and in 2021 disbursed $468 mi ...

Jasmine Social Investments Jasmine Social Investments is a New Zealand-based private foundation started by the entrepreneur Sam Morgan in 2006 following the sale of his company Trade Me to Fairfax Media. Similar resources * Acumen Fund * Bill and Melinda Gates Foundati ...

, and

Peery Foundation The Peery Foundation is a private foundation based in Palo Alto (near San Francisco), California, US. According to its website, it "primarily invests in early to mid-stage social entrepreneurs who are effectively addressing the issues of poverty. ...

). GiveWell stated in 2011 that it would consider the list of Mulago Foundation grantees (along with those of the other impact-focused grantmakers listed above, as well as the

Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Started in 2002, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation (DRK Foundation) is a global venture philanthropy firm supporting social enterprises. History The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Draper Richards, a venture capit ...

) as part of its list of charities to review to see if they qualified for GiveWell's highest ratings. The Mulago Foundation was also mentioned on the Tactical Philanthropy blog, and Kevin Starr of Mulago wrote a guest post for the blog. Kevin Starr of Mulago wrote an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review describing Mulago's definition of impact and some of the subtleties associated with the concept. His piece was referenced on the

Acumen Fund Acumen (formerly known as Acumen Fund, legally Acumen Fund, Inc.) is a nonprofit impact investment fund focused on investing in social enterprises that serve low-income individuals in United States. Acumen was founded in April 2001 by Jacquelin ...

blog. On March 11, 2014, Kevin Starr and Laura Hattendorf of the Mulago Foundation wrote a lengthy article in the '' Stanford Social Innovation Review'' skeptical of

cash transfer A cash transfer is a direct transfer payment of money to an eligible person. Cash transfers are either unconditional cash transfers or conditional cash transfers. They may be provided by organisations funded by private donors, or a local or re ...

charity

GiveDirectly GiveDirectly is a nonprofit organization operating in East Africa that helps families living in extreme poverty by making unconditional cash transfers to them via mobile phone. GiveDirectly transfers funds primarily to people in Kenya, Uganda, a ...

's accomplishment so far, saying that the evidence so far was underwhelming, though there might still be bigger gains a few years down the line. They contrasted GiveDirectly with other charities that they felt delivered more bang for the buck: One Acre Fund, VisionSpring,

KickStart International KickStart International is a nonprofit social enterprise headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. KickStart designs and mass-markets climate-smart irrigation technology to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, in order to enable a transition from ...

, and

Proximity Designs Proximity Designs is a not-for-profit social enterprise working to help reduce poverty for rural families in Myanmar (Burma). They design and market products and services that low-income farmers purchase and use to help increase their incomes. T ...

. Holden Karnofsky of

wrote a lengthy response countering that GiveDirectly's impact had been more rigorously established, and that Starr and Hattendorf were using flawed metrics to judge impact. The GiveDirectly board independently published a response on the GiveDirectly blog.

Similar resources

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a merging of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was ...

Good Ventures Good Ventures is a private foundation and philanthropic organization in San Francisco, and the fifth largest foundation in Silicon Valley. It was co-founded by Cari Tuna, a former ''Wall Street Journal'' reporter, and her husband Dustin Moskov ...

Omidyar Network Omidyar Network is a self-styled " philanthropic investment firm," composed of a foundation and an impact investment firm. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, Omidyar Network has committed over $1.5billion to ...

References

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External links

Mulago Foundation website
Foundations based in the United States Organizations established in 1993 Organizations based in San Francisco